Property Rights In the Cloud

May 04, 2012

midnight

When you hear the phrase "property rights," you probably think of farmers fighting environmental regulators and homeowners arguing with oil drillers. But in the Information Age, you should also be thinking about your computer—and asking, how much of you is really yours? It's not a navel-gazing rumination from a college Intro to Existentialism class—it's an increasingly pressing question in the brave new world of social networking and cloud computing. Last week's big technology announcement spotlighted the thorny issue. As the Los Angeles Times reported, Google's announcement of its "Google Drive" came with the promise that users will "retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content." But when you save files to Google's new hard-drive folder in the cloud, the terms of service you are required to agree to gives Google "a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute (your) content" as the company sees fit. When asked about this, Google argued that its provisions merely "enable us to give you the services you want—so if you decide to share a document with someone, or open it on a different device, you can." As reassuring as that seems, though, it's not that simple when considered in a larger context. In the last few years, major technology companies have become integral to interpersonal communication and information management. At the same time, many of these firms have tweaked user agreements in exactly the way Google has, helping the industry legally position itself for a mass intellectual property grab. That means whether you are using a photo-sharing site or a web-based email account, you may have signed off on letting one of these corporations do whatever it wants with your data. As evidence of that reality, Facebook in 2009 let advertisers employ users' uploaded photos to market products without users' explicit approval. Such a use unto itself may not offend you, but remember—that's only what you can see. Indeed, nobody has any comprehensive idea of how tech companies are using these provisions in their secret business-to-business dealings. If they are already using your photos, what else are they doing behind their firewall? Are they selling your data? Are they mining your cloud files looking to preemptively appropriate the next great innovations? Nobody knows...well, except the tech companies themselves. It's easy to ignore such concerns by believing that the scope of a mass data mining operation is prohibitively large. But that's not true. With the government already mining data from millions of Americans' phone records in the name of fighting terrorism, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that multibillion-dollar corporations can do the same. Of course, companies providing these services assert that intellectual property is a substitute currency for cash. As the logic goes, even though online services cost money to create and maintain, you the user don't have to pay actual cash for them because you are already paying in information about yourself, which technology companies then monetize. That may seem at first like a good deal. But amid companies' ever-intensifying pursuit of profit, the monetization process opens up the possibility for serious shenanigans. And here's the worst part: if a company ultimately pilfers inventions or trade secrets or anything else from users, it will already be too late. Because we so quickly hit "agree" when we originally opened our accounts, we will have signed away any claim to what we believed to be ours and ours alone. David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at <a href="http://www.davidsirota.com">www.davidsirota.com</a>. © 2012 Creators.com

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Property Rights, Corporate Person-hood, SOPA, and ...

Property Rights, Corporate Person-hood, SOPA, and PIPA -- It's all about who owns what is created/spoken, what a tangled mess! Look at how all these pieces fit together. This article is only the tip of the iceberg... and the American people are blissfully on board the Titanic!

Recent JS article was on the German state of Bavaria preparing to re-publish "Mein Kampf", just before the 70-year German Copyright is set to expire. Bavaria had acquired the assets of Hitler's estate after he did himself in. They had prevented any further publishing, but now want to republish it while they still have control, annotate it with lots of other articles designed to discount Hitler's message, make it difficult for the Aryan types of followers to use it as their Bible. No censorship, still free speech, but it's like putting pictures of cancer-ridden lungs on packs of cigarettes... it's for the public's good.

Corporate Person-hood, Patent reform, Copyright reform. Intellectual Property (IP) lifespans were always being extended, Mickey Mouse was the reason for the 70 year copyright rule we have now, enough to make sure Disney could use it's monopoly to live on until death, and enrich his grand-babies kids as well.

How about extending Patent rights to "75 years past the death of the patent owner"? A patent was to give the inventor a temporary monopoly head-start in making money off the invention, but eventually make it public, so it is then available for it's true free market value. Suppose Corporate Person-hood came to be, a "human person" eventually dies, but a corporation is passed from shareholder to shareholder, does not die. It would mean the total end of "generic" drugs. Suppose the rights to a Smallpox vaccine were "protected" this way. I get that they changed the rules of "first-to-invent" to "first-to-file" to put it on par with other countries, but how many inventors are also trained as lawyers, have the time or staff to draw up papers? Instead, an aspiring Thomas Edison must hook up with one of those inventor sites you see on late-night TV, and if the inventor does not like the terms of the deal, refuses to complete the negotiation, the corporation can just take it, invoking the "uncooperative party" clause. Corporation wins, true creator loses.

SOPA and PIPA, was on the surface supposed to be able to shut-down foreign sites like "Wiki-leaks" or "Pirate Bay" with no American due process. All fine and dandy, should have been an easy win. But I feared that it could be twisted to make sure that the only internet site operators allowed to "spread their free-speech news" would be those who had reporters on the ground, had permission by the subject to publish ANYTHING. Means that person with the cell-phone who happened to catch a politician's off-stage gaffe could be prevented from posting it on the internet, after all, that gaffe was the "Intellectual Property" of the politician who said it, no casual cameraman could be allowed to let it spread further, and any website who posted it will simply be blocked... including all the legal postings on the site.

SOPA and/or PIPA had another little gotcha... Today, if a corporation finds that somebody copied their stuff, the corporation must put up the money to enforce it. New rules wold be like dialing 911, and then the government law enforcement would have to pay for the investigation and prosecution. Good change for the new artist or inventor just getting started, but what if the Patent or Copyright owner is Big Pharma or General Electric? Do you the taxpayer want to pay these enforcement costs?

Anonymous more than 12 years ago